TechCrunch

techcrunch.com — It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that we first wrote about Lyft, and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco. Now, 366 days later, Lyft is celebrating the anniversary of that launch with some huge news: It's raise..

techcrunch.com — After just a year with the company, Badoo COO Ben Ling is leaving the social networking site to join Khosla Ventures. Ling, who has formerly held senior executive roles at companies like Google, YouTube, and Facebook, will join a growing team at Vinod Khosla's venture firm, as it has been add..

techcrunch.com — The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they're making the Pidora "remix" of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian distribution of Debian, Pidora is compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi.

techcrunch.com — Lambda Labs, an early stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says.

techcrunch.com — Oh, Kim Dotcom. You just never stop surprising us. Just hours after Twitter finally rolled out its long-awaited Two-Factor authentication, the Megaupload founder is claiming to have invented the entire mechanism... and he's got a patent to prove it. "But they won't even verify my Twitter account?!", he says.

techcrunch.com — Mobile payment platform Square has announced that it is now publicly available in Japan, its first country outside of North America. The iPhone is very popular in Japan, making it a potentially strong crossover market for Square, which first launched on iOS.

techcrunch.com — Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn't get around to announce one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your photos for things like sunse..

techcrunch.com — Social networking and messaging firm Imo.im has an interesting new take on social networking, and it's raised money to get more people on board! The funding was led by co-founder Georges Harik, who also just happened to be one of Google's first 10 employees, and therefore is swimming in money.

techcrunch.com — After being acquired by Facebook, the mobile back-end service Parse has been extremely busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like web hosting for developers. The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing.

techcrunch.com — Google today announced that it has been taking its Street View Trekker - the compact backpack version of its Street View cars - and its underwater Street View cameras to the Galapagos Islands and that it plans to make these images available on Google Maps later this year. The company worked togeth..

techcrunch.com — Barely a month or two after launching the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing service Popset, the team realized they were solving the wrong problem. Users weren't struggling to share their photos with groups; they needed tools to help them organize and manage their photo libraries across a variety of platforms and services.

techcrunch.com — Sometimes, when a truly innovative startup is acquired by a larger company, innovation slows to a crawl. And other times, when an acquisition happens, a company gets the backup and investment it needs to keep on innovating. It seems like that latter case is true for Mailbox, which, two months aft..

techcrunch.com — For those who use Evernote as a to-do list application, the service just became more useful today with the launch of a much-requested feature: reminders. Available to both Evernote and Evernote Business users on Mac, iOS and web (to start), the option now appears as an alarm clock icon at the top-right of the note on Mac and web, and the bottom of the note on mobile (iPhone and iPad).

techcrunch.com — After hundreds of thousands of accounts were compromised a couple months ago, Twitter today launches two-factor authentication through SMS to protect people from hacks and phishing scams. You can enable the feature in you Account settings, which will then send your phone number a verification code by SMS that you enter after entering your name and password to prove you're the account owner.

techcrunch.com — Remember how over a year ago, everyone was all excited about the forthcoming Pinterest API? CEO Ben Silbermann even teased its release in a March 2012 email to Pinterest users detailing a Terms of Service change. And API documentation even once popped up on the site, only later to lead to a 404?